Philip Rivers and the Chargers finally beat the

KANSAS CITY Tyreek Hill Jersey , Mo. ? Kansas City Chiefs.All it took was feverish fourth-quarter comeback, a questionable pass-interference call, a tense video review of the final touchdown and the gutsy decision to try a 2-point conversion.The result: Chargers 29, Chiefs 28.Justin Jackson’s touchdown run with a couple minutes left gave the Chargers a chance. They quickly got the ball back from Patrick Mahomes and the NFL’s highest-scoring offense, and Rivers led a tense final drive that included a fourth-down dart to Travis Benjamin and that crucial penalty on Kendall Fuller in the back of the end zone.The flag gave the Chargers the ball at the 1, and Rivers found Mike Williams along the sideline on the very next play. And when his TD catch with 4 seconds left was confirmed, coach Anthony Lynn sent his offense back onto the field to end five years’ worth of frustration.Williams found himself alone in the end zone to secure the 2-point conversion.Not only did the Chargers (11-3) clinch a playoff berth, they forged a first-place tie with the Chiefs (11-3) in the AFC West while ending a nine-game losing streak to their longtime division rivals.100View Gallery Gallery:View from the sidelines: NFL cheerleaders 2018Raj Mehta-USA TODAY Sports | Raj MehtaRivers threw for 313 yards and two touchdowns, though he also tossed a pair of interceptions, and Williams had seven catches for 76 yards and two scores while adding another on the ground.Jackson ran for 58 yards and a touchdown in place of the injured Melvin Gordon.Mahomes was held to just 243 yards and two touchdowns for Kansas City, and his inability to pick up a first down in the closing minutes proved costly. The Chiefs forced the Chargers to burn two timeouts on their last drive, but Mahomes was sacked by Isaac Rochell and Kansas City had to punt.The Chiefs never got the ball back on offense.Hyped by the return of star safety Eric Berry, it looked for a while as if the Chiefs would simply resume their vexation of Rivers at Arrowhead Stadium. Steven Nelson leaped to snag a jump ball for an interception on the second play of the game, and Rivers tossed another just before halftime.Mahomes and Co. took advantage of their early momentum.Kansas City breezed downfield after Nelson’s interception, and the young MVP candidate threw a dart to Demarcus Robinson 鈥?while in the grasp of Chargers safety Adrian Phillips 鈥?for a 7-0 lead.Then after a punt, Darrel Williams took a screen pass for his first career touchdown.The Chargers finally reached the end zone in the second quarter Carlos Hyde Jersey , when Mike Williams caught a short TD pass. But it came moments after wide receiver Keenan Allen hurt his hip while trying to make a leaping grab in the corner of the end zone 鈥?he briefly returned before sitting out the rest of the game.Mike Williams continued to pick up the slack the rest of the game.After the Chiefs pushed their lead to 21-7 on Damien Williams’ touchdown run, the Chargers’ big, rangy wide receiver answered with a 19-yard end-around for a score. And when then Chiefs went on another methodical scoring drive to take a 28-14 lead with just over 8 minutes left in the game, Williams helped the Chargers head the other way for another answering touchdown to stay in the game.TONY G’S AWARDThe Chiefs added TE Tony Gonzalez to their Hall of Fame at halftime. The six-time All-Pro played his first 12 seasons with the Chiefs before finishing his career in Atlanta. His name was unveiled next to that of WR Carlos Carson on the ring of honor inside Arrowhead Stadium.INACTIVE STARSGordon (knee) tried to warmup before telling coach Anthony Lynn that he couldn’t play, joining Ekeler (concussion) on their inactive list. RB Spencer Ware (hamstring), WR Sammy Watkins (foot) and OL Cam Erving were the starters out for Kansas City.INJURIESChargers: Allen received treatment on the sideline after nearly making his spectacular TD catch, and he returned briefly before slowly walking off. He left for the locker room and did not return.UP NEXTChargers: Return home for a primetime game against the Ravens on Dec. 22.Chiefs: Visit the Seahawks for another primetime game Dec. 23.New for the 2018 season: True power rankings For me — like many Arrowhead Pride readers — AP’s weekly rundown of power rankings is must-reading during the season.I know perfectly well that power rankings are meaningless since they represent nothing more than the opinion of some NFL pundit.But I can’t help myself.I read them anyway.Going into the 2017 season, I started wondering: Is there a way to do it better?Is there a way to make power rankings more meaningful? And wouldn’t it be nice if you could look at them side by side, and more easily compare rankings from different sources?So I spent the season collecting data and experimenting with it, revising my methods and calculations as I went along.You’ll see the results starting this season, as we present Arrowhead Pride True Power Rankings — a more complete look at the state of the NFL each week.Part 1: Pundit Power RankingsOn Tuesdays — just as we’ve always done — we’ll give you power rankings from a variety of sources, including each pundit’s comments about the Chiefs.But we’ll present the rankings side-by-side, so you can more easily compare how different sources view each NFL team.Then we’ll add an extra feature.We’ll aggregate the rankings into a single ranking based on the power rankings from ESPN, Sports Illustrated’s MMQB, NFL.com, the Sporting News Juan Thornhill white jersey , Yahoo.com and CBS.com.Why these particular six?All are well-respected national sources that we know will publish power rankings each week.The rankings published by two of them — ESPN and MMQB — represent the opinion of all their writers, rather than just one.Since we could consider their group opinion as more valid, our calculations will weight those two more heavily than the other four.As an example of what this will look like, here’s what the Pundit Power Rankings looked like going into Week 17 last season.Pundit Power Rankings for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsLike all the tables we’ll show you each week, rows for the Chiefs will be in one color, rows for AFC West teams will be in another color, and rows for the remaining AFC teams will be in yet another.This immediately draws your eye not only to the information about your favorite team, but also to the teams that will most concern the Chiefs during the regular season: their division and conference opponents.We’ll also repeat the header row every eight rows, which will make it a little easier for you to read the table as you scroll through it, and also neatly divide the teams into quarters.Wait... did I say all the tables?I sure did.Part 2: Cruncher Power RankingsWe know, of course, there are other ways to evaluate the relative strength NFL teams — ones that do not depend on a sportswriter’s opinion, but instead on hard data.So on Wednesdays starting after Week 2, we’ll give you NFL rankings generated by four well-known methods used by number-crunchers: ELO from FiveThirtyEight.com, DVOA from FootballOutsiders.com, SRS (for Simple Rating System) from Pro-Football-Reference.com Juan Thornhill Kansas City Chiefs Jerseys , and PE (for Pythagorean Expectation — sometimes called expected wins) as originally adapted for pro football by Football Outsiders.All of these methods have strengths and weaknesses.All but DVOA use points scored (both for and against) as the base data for their calculations.All but PE take opponent strength into consideration.Only Elo includes how a team did in the previous season.Two of them — Elo and PE — were originally developed for different purposes, but have been adapted for pro football.There are other differences — if you’re really interested, click the links to learn more — but for our purposes, only one thing matters: they don’t depend on the personal opinion of a writer who doesn’t watch every game of every team.As you might expect, we’ll not only present these power rankings from the number-crunchers, individually, but average them together, too.Here’s what that looked like going into Week 17 last season.Cruncher Power Rankings for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsYou may have noticed that the 2017 playoff teams are marked with asterisks in these first two tables.We’ve done this so you can see whether the pundits or crunchers better predicted the outcome of the 2017 playoffs.As you might expect, it’s a mixed bag.The pundits had the advantage of knowing which teams had the best shot of making the playoffs with one week to go.On the other hand, the crunchers predicted the eventual Super Bowl winner.You can also see the how pundits — in general — are influenced by quarterbacks.Going into Week 17 last year, they unanimously thought the Patriots — with Tom Brady — had the best chance to win the Super Bowl.The crunchers had more variance in their evaluations, but weren’t distracted by the fact that backup quarterback Nick Foles would be under center for the Eagles in the postseason.This is not to say that the crunchers will always be more accurate.They won’t be.But it illustrates how much fun it was for me last season, as I watched how the pundits and the crunchers agreed — and sometimes, how they disagreed.Part 3: Combined Power RankingsEach week, we’ll make it easy for you to compare how the pundits and crunchers differ by presenting their rankings side-by-side — and, of course Kansas City Chiefs Jerseys Stitched , give you a cumulative ranking that averages them together.Combined Power Rankings for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsI should note here how these rankings will be averaged together.Sharp-eyed readers may already have noticed that some of these seem... wrong.Two and six for the Steelers averages to four, and five and one for the Eagles averages to three.So why would the Steelers be ranked ahead of the Eagles?This is because we’re not averaging the rankings from each table.Instead, we’re averaging the numbers behind those rankings.In the Pundit rankings for Week 17, the Steelers average ranking was 2.25, while it was 5.25 in the Crunchers rankings.That’s an average of 3.75.The Eagles Pundit average was 5.125, and their Crunchers average was 2.5.That averages out to 3.8125.Therefore, the Steelers ranked ahead of the Eagles in the Combined rankings.But we’re not done yet.Part 4: Cruncher GradesIf you’re familiar with my past writing, you may recall that I am not a fan of statistical rankings.They can be misleading because they can only show that one number is larger (or smaller) than another — not how close they are to each other.Statisticians have a trick to fix this problem.They calculate standard deviations from average for a set of values, which is used to tell if the difference between two values from the set is statistically significant.Standard deviations from average are expressed as a number that is almost always between -3 and 3, and is usually carried out to multiple decimal points.But you’re not going to have to compare -1.6875 to 1.3496.Instead, we’ll do the same thing your school teachers did: convert them to letter grades ranging from FF (less than -3) to AA (greater than 3) — like this:The key thing to remember is that only a difference of a full letter grade (or more) is statistically significant.So if one team has a B+ and another team has a B, the difference between them is measurable, but not significant.If one team has a C and another has a D+, the difference is a bit more measurable, but still not significant.But a team with a B+ grade is significantly better than one with a C+ grade.We can’t do this for Pundit rankings, because there is no numerical value behind each pundit’s opinion.But we can do it with the data underlying the Cruncher rankings Kansas City Chiefs Jerseys 2019 , because they are numerical values.Since the Cruncher numbers are all based on entirely different systems, we can’t compare the raw numbers directly; that would be comparing apples to oranges.But by calculating standard deviations from average for each set of values, we effectively convert all of them to juicy red tomatoes — which we can compare directly.Here’s how that looked going into Week 17 last season.Cruncher Grades for Week 17Chiefs AFC West Teams Other AFC TeamsThese grades reveal an essential truth about ranking statistics of any kind: numbers that we spend a lot of time comparing sometimes don’t turn out to be significantly different from each other.While it might be true — for example — that one quarterback has a completion percentage of 60.1 and another has one of 60.4, the difference is measurable, but not necessarily significant.The same is true of ranked statistical values.We might assume — for example — that the top five rushers in the league are elite. But by grading the values this way, we might learn that only one is head and shoulders above everyone else.The other four might be merely above average.What we see here is that going into Week 17 last season, there were six teams that were roughly equivalent — at least in terms of how the crunchers evaluated them.So going into the playoffs, there really wasn’t one team that stood out as having the best chance to win it all.That might turn out to be the case in 2018, too.Or... it might not.It’s possible that when we reach Week 17, we’ll see that one or two teams are clearly above the rest of the field — or it’ll be anybody’s postseason to win.We’re looking forward to watching how it all unfolds, and hope that this weekly dive into what the pundits and crunchers think will be entertaining — and enlightening.Watch for it every Tuesday and Wednesday during the regular season on AP!

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